Michael Mullins (Fine Gael)

I will keep it brief. I welcome the Minister, who is off to a great start. We all want to see him take more risks, because the crisis we are facing is of such enormous proportions.

The county enterprise boards in most counties - certainly in my own county of Galway - have made a valuable contribution to job creation and getting people started in business over the years. There are lots of fine young people who are unemployed but have lots of skills, and who certainly could create jobs for themselves and maybe for one or two others. There is a concern that the county enterprise boards are underresourced at the moment and that staffing is an issue. What are the Minister's plans in this regard? Does he intend to provide resources to the county enterprise boards either in their present format or under some other body? We need to be pumping money in there.

My second question is about access to finance, which came up this morning at the all-party committee. Every small business trying to access finance is facing difficulty, yet at the same time we hear that there has never been so much money lying in the banks in the form of savings. Is the Minister considering ways of encouraging people to invest some of their savings in job creation projects? I know the business expansion scheme is available. We need to encourage people, in our hour of need, to start thinking about our country and invest their money in job creation projects.